


A Company of Sundry Folk

by Siria



Category: DCU, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 18:50:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12990330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: Diana, the team, and tales on the journey to Vard.





	A Company of Sundry Folk

**Author's Note:**

  * For [esteefee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/esteefee/gifts).



> Written for Esteefee for the Fandom Loves Puerto Rico Fundraiser, with thanks for her generous donation. Thanks to Sheafrotherdon for audiencing, and Trinityofone for betaing.

England, to Diana, seemed hardly better going than it had coming. True, this port wasn't home to the same stink and clatter as the city of London, but the skies were just as leaden grey and the docks smelled of unwashed bodies and festering things. As they clambered onto the little boat, Diana heard the shrill scream of a horse being whipped to force it onto one of the great troop transports, but Steve wouldn't let her go to help it. 

"But it is in pain!" Diana protested. She thought of the horses her sisters cared for at home—how Acantha and Epione could raise a mare to be fearless in battle and yet affectionate caretakers of little girls who sneaked pieces of apple to them; how moss-soft their noses were against the palm of her hand. "Can't you hear it?"

Steve's mouth was pinched. He turned away from her as he stowed his kit bag beneath the bench that ran along one side of the boat's top deck. "I can hear perfectly well, and so can you, which means you heard the captain say if we don't leave right now, we lose the tide for the day. You want to make it across the Channel by nightfall or don't you?"

Diana settled back into her own seat with what she was aware was an ill will, caught between the impulse to stay and help and the desire to find the Front, to fight. Ares' poison was potent indeed, to make men treat even simple creatures in such an abominable way. She clenched her fists in her lap. First the battlefield, she thought, and Ares' defeat, and then she would return and find that whip and put it to a better use. 

The little boat slipped away from the docks and set out for the open water. Sameer and Charlie seemed hardly to notice, nestled in their greatcoats and playing some manner of game with small pieces of paper. The weather was still gloomy, the waters grey and choppy, though the pale cliffs that rose up behind them did remind Diana of Themyscira and the ever-present warmth of its sun. Thoughts of home steadied her, and between that, and the discovery of the ship's cat, Diana soon felt herself in better spirits. She buried her fingers in the cat's thick orange fur and made friends with the captain, a red-faced man named Louis-Paul who spoke a most fascinating dialect of French-Flemish and helped her twist her vowels to match the local accent just so.

Steve spoke not a word the whole voyage, and Diana told herself that this was his choice to make. 

"You're sure you're not from Dunkerque, mam'zelle?" Louis-Paul said as they came in sight of land at last. "Why, I could set you down among my nieces and no one would be able to choose among you!"

"Oh no," Diana assured him, scratching right behind the cat's ears so that it purred and stretched and flexed in her lap. "I come from an island which is normally many leagues from here but is always where it is best for it to be."

Louis-Paul blinked at her in confusion, and seemed glad to have to turn his attention to the task of navigating the river estuary in search of a quiet place to leave them. They tied up at a spot where a smaller river flowed into the greater one. Diana set the cat down with a farewell pet, thanked Louis-Paul for the lesson, and followed Sameer and Charlie down the gangplank. It was curious how even a few hours spent aboard the little boat made it so that for her first few steps on land, the ground beneath her seemed to bounce just as much as did the gangplank.

"Dinah?" she asked Steve as he in turn stepped off the boat and shouldered his pack. "What does this mean?"

"What?" Steve looked baffled for a moment before following Diana's pointing finger to where the word was picked out in dull gold lettering near the ship's prow. "Oh! Well, that's just the ship's name."

"You give names to ships," Diana said dubiously. The Amazons gave names to their horses, of course, and the nymphs who lived in the rivers and groves of Themyscira had names—but those were living things and thus deserving of respect, and songs in their memory. How could a boat be alive? 

"Aye," said Charlie. He pulled a pouch from one of his coat pockets and opened it to retrieve a small clump of what looked like dried leaves, which he then tucked away into one cheek. "It's good luck for a boat to have a lassie's name, ye ken."

"It is?" Diana was fascinated. "Why? Do you name them for your fiercest women? Is this Dinah a great warrior?" She had not seen any women yet take up arms here in the World of Men, but there were so very many of them—surely there had to be some. A woman's hand could wield a sword as easily as a spindle, after all. 

Steve coughed and began to walk. "Not… exactly. She's a figure from the Bible. That's a religious text that a lot of people around here believe in. She lived a long time ago and I, uh, I guess people remember her for that."

Charlie snorted and spat something brown and noxious into the grass. "There speaks a man who wisnae made to scrub behind his ears every week before Sunday School."

"I do not understand," Diana said, looking from one to the other. 

"And I'm fine with that," Steve said hurriedly. "Come on, we want to get a move on. Only a couple of hours before the sun sets."

They made their way along the riverbank. The ground was soggy beneath their feet, each step of theirs grinding the grass down into the mud, and Sameer grumbled fastidiously under his breath in Arabic that his boots would never regain their former sheen. "Idiotic excuse for weather," he said, and Diana found that she could sympathise. 

A few minutes walking brought them to the edge of a small town, where battered fishing boats were pulled up snug against stone quays. Near them, waiting for something—for what?—were tents and sad, smoking campfires and scattered huddles of soldiers, and Diana couldn't see one among them who was not battered and bandaged. As she watched, more soldiers came galloping up on black horses—fine beasts, but ones whose heads were almost impossible to see, encased as they were in gas masks. 

Diana thought of the horses screaming in fear back on the English docks and repressed a shudder. "The gas will kill everything. What kind of weapon kills innocents?"

"In this war? Every kind." Steve walked with his gaze fixed on the horizon, though Diana couldn't imagine that the view was any better there. 

Indeed it was not. They skirted the town, following the main roadway to reach the top of a small rise, pausing there so that Steve and Sameer could get their bearings on a map. Before them stretched a countryside made of the same shades of green and grey and brown as the coastline. It was well-tended, Diana could tell that much, with squares and rectangles of harvested fields surrounded by neat rows of cropped bushes. Here and there were farmhouses; in the distance, what looked like a village clustered around one, much taller building. Smoke rose from chimneys to hang, pale columns, in the late afternoon light. 

It all looked very peaceful. From far away, the still air carried noises: muffled but enormous, as if thunderbolts were raining down on an entire forest and steadily splitting the trunks of great oaks. 

Charlie spat with greater than usual vehemence. "Artillery barrage," he said, but would answer none of Diana's questions. 

Steve and Sameer settled on a route that would take them north-east as steadily as possible, skirting potential trouble spots. "Takes us a little longer, and it'll be well past dark by the time we catch up with the Chief," Steve said, folding up the map and tucking it back into an inside pocket, "but less chance of us being captured. Everyone good?" 

Then he began to walk, the others falling in behind him, which Diana found a little jarring. The Amazons rarely took the auspices or made libations, knowing that the gods were no longer there to send omens or receive honours. Still, they were beginning a journey which would take them to the field of battle and Ares' final and permanent defeat. Surely it deserved some greater preamble than that—oaths sworn, speeches made?

Diana's argument in favour of tradition fell on deaf ears. She sighed and said, "But we need to do something—sing marching songs? Swap tales as we go?"

"No," Steve said firmly, right as Sameer said, "I know some stories."

"You do?" Diana beamed at him. "Oh, do tell us one, please."

"This is one of the tales my grandmother passed down to me, a story of a man who lived long ago. Where I come from, people call him Goha, but in different parts of the world people call him Juha, or Nasroddin Hoja, or other names again. No one agrees on his name, and no one agrees about him. Was he cunning? Was he a fool?" Sameer spread his arms wide. "I will tell you this story, and you will decide.

"Now Goha was a Bedouin, a nomad. He had no home but the road and the road took him everywhere, and one day the road brought him to an oasis that was home to a little village. As he walked through the village Goha smelled something—something amazing—and he followed his nose around the corner and there it was."

"A Scotch distillery!" said Charlie. "Right there in the middle of the bloody desert. A miracle."

"In fact, my friend," said Sameer, "it was a vegetable garden."

"I've smelled things a wee bit better than cabbages in my time," said Charlie. 

"Not these cabbages you haven't!" said Sameer. "Though all the other gardens in the village were just barely starting to sprout, this garden was full of life: cabbages and cucumbers and beans and eggplants and peas and onions, tomatoes so ripe on the vine that they seemed ready to burst!"

"What is a tomato?" Diana asked, stepping to one side to let pass a family, all of them weighed down beneath hefty packs. Even the littlest ones carried something—a chicken clutched under an arm, a bundle of clothing. Every one of them looked dirty and tired, mouths pinched. None of this had been mentioned in the epics that Diana had read so eagerly as a child. 

"It's a vegetable that comes from where Steve comes from," said Charlie. 

"Technically, it's a fruit," Steve said absently. It was the first thing he'd said in a while, focused as he was either on the compass in his hand or the quickly darkening horizon. 

"Aye, well then it's a fruit you eat like it's a vegetable," Charlie said. "And it's red." 

"And these particular tomatoes smelled more tempting than any that Goha had ever smelled before," Sameer said, tipping his nose into the air as if to catch the imaginary scent. "He could think of nothing more delicious than taking all of these vegetables and stirring them together with spices to make a stew more delicious than any he'd ever made before. So Goha tiptoed his way around the wall, and he picked peas in their pods and tomatoes on their vines and pulled up onions from the dark soil, and he placed them all in a sack he just happened to have with him."

Steve snorted. "Think that excuse would go over well with a cop?"

"Entirely coincidental," Sameer said. "But a wonderful convenience. It meant that he didn't bruise the vegetables—and since you can't make a stew with peas and tomatoes and onions alone, well, he added some garlic and some basil and some other herbs, everything of a quality beyond what you would find in the most expensive stall in the best souk."

For a moment he fell quiet as they all crammed in together along the verge, letting a convoy pass by: great machines that lurched along the rutted roadway, hauling supplies to the front. They belched out dark clouds of smoke that made Diana cough.

"Where was I?" Sameer said when they could hear themselves think again. "Ah, yes. Goha gathered together all these herbs and vegetables, and just as the bag was full, he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, and Goha turned and saw a man behind him: a giant of a man, much taller than Goha, and surely able to crush Goha between the palms of his mighty hands."

"Ah," Diana murmured. She was on much firmer ground with one of the Gigantes than she was with tomatoes. 

"'What are you doing here?' the man asked Goha, full of suspicion at finding a complete stranger in the garden he was so proud of, holding a bag full of vegetables from that garden.

"'Well', Goha said, 'I came here on the wind.'

"Now the gardener was very shocked. 'The wind? What are you talking about?' he said. 

"'That very strong wind that blew this morning!' Goha replied, as if surprised that anyone could forget it. 'It was so wild and strong that it picked me up and blew me away from my tent in the desert, and it was only by Allah's grace that I landed safely here. Wasn't that some wind?'"

"I've had some nights like that in Glasgow, fair enough," Charlie said. 

Sameer elbowed him in the side before he carried on. "The gardener squinted at Goha. It wasn't a likely story, but the winds that blew in from the desert could be very strong, and this man was very slight. But even if the little man had been blown here by the wind, well, that didn't explain the sack.

'"Oh, _this_ old thing,' said Goha. 'Well, see how the wind makes the leaves dance? I'm terrified that the wind will pick me up and blow me away again and this sack was the only thing around heavy enough to hold me down. I'm still dizzy from this morning, you know, and who knows where I would end up!'

"'I see,' said the gardener, who was more than a little confused, but who couldn't find any obvious holes in Goha's story. After all, so many things were possible out here in the desert. 'But how did all of those vegetables from my garden end up in your sack?'

"Goha startled and scratched his head and peered inside the sack. 'Well fancy that!' he said. 'No wonder it's so heavy! But I'll tell you sir, I have no answer to that. Shall we call it a mystery?' And the gardener was now very confused, and didn't know what to do or what to say, so he simply wished Goha a safe trip home and retreated back inside his house. And this is the end of my story, but my questions remain: was Goha cunning? Was he a fool? This tale took place so long ago that now, only Allah knows." Sameer finished his story with a little flourish of his hands and a courtly bow. 

"I know," Diana said. "He was Hermes in disguise."

Sameer stared at her for a moment. "Well, but it's a fable, Miss Diana, there's not supposed to be one right answ—"

"But of course it was Hermes! Who else would take such delight in playing tricks on people?"

Sameer now seemed as confused as the gardener in his tale. "That is certainly one way to take it, but I don't think I get the joke?"

"It's not a joke, Hermes really—"

Steve cut her off. "Time for another story! Charlie, have you got a story to tell?"

"I," Charlie said with an air of great solemnity, "have many stories to tell, Stevie lad."

"Do you have a story to tell that's fit for mixed company?" Steve said hastily, glancing over at Diana. 

"Fewer of those," Charlie said. They went over a bridge and then turned off the main road, following a dirt path that led alongside a placid river with curiously straight banks. Tall trees curved overhead, deepening the evening shadows. "But one or two all the same. My gran's people were from the Isle of Mull, away in the west. They left during the Clearances, but before that they were island folk, fishermen and crofters. I'm Edinburgh to my bones, me, but my gran never stopped wishing she was back on Mull and she told me all the stories she learned at the knee of her gran. And ye ken a grandmother's stories are always the truest."

Maybe that was true. Diana didn't think she'd ever had a grandmother, as such, so she couldn't say one way or another. 

"This is the tale of the monk MacKinnon," Charlie continued, "who was alive back when we Scots still paid attention to what yon pope had to say for himself."

Diana looked a question at Steve. 

"A monk's a... kind of priest who lives with other priests," Steve said. "And a pope's a kind of... really important priest. Look, Charlie was right, I really didn't pay much attention during Sunday School."

"As I was saying," Charlie said, "before I was so rudely interrupted by Yanks with nae manners, this is the tale of the monk MacKinnon, who lived away on the west side of the island, where the cliffs rise steep up out of the sea and on a clear day you can see all the way to Iona. And in one of those cliffs is a cave where the monk lived. No one knew why he chose to live there, because it's a deep, dark split in the rock, so deep 'tis said that if you walk into it far enough you'll come out in the middle of the fires of hell itself."

"Maybe he was there to stand guardian, your monk," Sameer said. "To make sure that no jinn emerged to torment those who lived nearby."

"Well if that's the case he was a piss-poor guardian," Charlie said. "Pardon my language, Miss Diana. Because one night MacKinnon fell asleep without offering up his usual prayers, and later some said that maybe that's what did it. That's what let a crack somewhere get bigger, and out from the cave came the Wild Hunt. The whole of the island shook with the sound of the hooves and the blowing of the horns. Any soul brave enough to risk a glimpse out through the doors of their crofts saw the hunters go streaming past. Huge they were, and hideous, all mounted on black horses and black he-goats, and following black hounds whose eyes glowed red and whose chops were stained with blood."

"Hell hounds. A classic," Steve said. 

"Like Cerberus?" Diana asked, hitching up her skirts so she could hop over a great muddy puddle in the middle of the path. 

"Aye," said Charlie, striding through the puddle heedless of the splashes it left right up to his knees. "If Cerberus was ever sent up from Hades to track down sinners and drag them into the hereafter. The whole island of Mull was quaking with fear. So up rose Hector MacFadyen from his bed in his family's house in Tiroran, and Hector was a great piper. He dressed himself in his finest suit of clothes, and called to his mother to hand him his bagpipes."

"This," Sameer volunteered to Diana in French, "is an instrument that Scots use to make what they call music, only it is powered by the screaming souls of dead cats."

That seemed an outlandish idea to Diana, but then again, just a few weeks ago she had no reason to believe that something as peculiar as an omnibus existed—let alone that hundreds of Londoners willingly crammed themselves inside them daily. She smiled at Sameer, resolved to ask Steve more about the bagpipe cats later, and turned her attention back to Charlie. 

"Hector strode over to the other side of the headland, accompanied only by his faithful dog," Charlie continued, "down to the wet sands in front of the mouth of MacKinnon's Cave, and he played a challenge on his pipes. It was the loudest and the best playing that had ever heard on Mull, louder even than the hoofbeats of the Wild Hunt, and a rhythm to it that would have made the most staid Kirk elder tapping his foot. And the Hunt recognised the challenge for what it was and wheeled their steeds around and galloped back in the direction they came from, dozens and dozens of them heading right for the mouth of the cave where Hector MacFadyen stood waiting for them."

Diana felt her eyes grow wide at the thoughts of such bravery. "What happened to him? Did he prove his mettle—save his village?"

Charlie snorted. "One great fool against all the Wild Hunt? No one ever saw sight nor sound of Hector again, not even his bagpipes. Three days later the wee dog came racing back into the village, crazed with fear and not a hair left on it from the top of its head to the tip of its tail."

Diana frowned. This wasn't the bracing ending she had been expecting. 

"Cheery," Steve said. "But I don't know what else I should have expected from a Scotsman."

"Aye, and there speaks a Yankee whose kin are Welsh. At least a Scotsman would _try_ ," said Charlie. "Anyway, Miss Diana, you set us this challenge but you haven't us a tale yet to let us know who your kin are."

"Oh," Diana said. She hadn't thought at all about what story she could share in return: what would be fit to match tricksters and hopeless cases? Something encouraging, perhaps—one of the tales that her sisters would share when they sat around the hearth on one of the longest nights, keeping the cold at bay with a blazing fire and adventures recalled. 

"This is a story told to me by my aunt Antiope, back when I was still quite little and she was beginning to train me in her arts." Diana didn't know how much time would have to elapse before she could think of her aunt without feeling a sharp pang of loss, but she knew that it was better to keep her name alive than to let her memory lapse, as lost as a formless soul in the Asphodel Meadows. "It is the story of a woman called Medusa."

"Och, we know that one already," Charlie said. "She was the monster lassie."

Diana stared at him. "She was not a monster!"

"You've got to admit, the fact that she had…" Steve waved his free hand in the general direction of his head. "… Snakes for hair, turned innocent people to stone, that does seem pretty monstrous to me."

"For once, logic is on my friend's side," said Sameer, turning the collar of his coat up against the growing breeze. 

"You are not remembering the tale properly!" Diana insisted. 

"Pretty sure my memory's good when it comes to something like that," Steve said. "Venomous living snakes instead of hair, so ugly looking at her could turn a guy to stone. Athena does it to curse her for uh, for being defiled in Athena's temple. Then the gods help Perseus cut Medusa's head off and he uses it as a weapon. That's the story, every schoolchild—"

Diana came to a halt in the middle of the path, her eyes stinging with angry tears. Why was it that in the World of Men, all the stories were wrong? "That's not how it happened at all!"

The others stopped too, and turned to look at her. They all looked bemused. Steve held up a hand. "Diana—"

"No," Diana said, setting off again at a quicker pace and letting them fall in behind her. "Here is the true story of Medusa, as it was passed on to me by Antiope, and I pass it on to you. Medusa was close kin to the Amazons, but where Zeus made the Amazons to build bridges to greater understanding between men, Athena remade Medusa to be the sign of every woman's righteous anger. Where Poseidon had hurt her, Athena reached out a hand to help Medusa up, and she helped her to be fierce, and to be feared, and every Amazon honoured her for it. Every woman felt the justice of Medusa's purpose, and they loved her for it.

"And Medusa was a daughter of Gaia, of the very soil beneath us—" Diana stamped a foot for emphasis "—and the snake is a creature of the earth. What shame is there to wear your mother's sigil as part of you? Medusa held her head high when she walked, and every scale of every serpent that coiled around her shoulders shone bright in the sunlight, blue and green and black and gold." 

Diana thought of the statue of Medusa that stood outside the library on Themyscira: a proud figure, hewn of marble and hefting a sword in one hand. "You say to look at her was enough to turn a person to stone. This is the story you heard? It was only a half-truth. No woman ever looked on Medusa and turned to stone. No woman had reason to fear her retribution, or to dread hearing the hoofbeats of Pegasus behind them."

Diana told them the story of Medusa as it had been passed down to her by those who had borne witness to it, every familiar beat of it: how Medusa had saved the lovely Andromeda from the wrath of the sea monster Cetus; how Andromeda had licked the taste of salt from Medusa's lips and mixed it with Cetus' blood and the foam from the dancing waves to make Pegasus. How they had escaped together on Pegasus' back, soaring from Andromeda's Ethiopian home to the shores of Greece in search of the man who had spread falsehoods about Andromeda and set her kin against her. There Medusa first wrenched the mask from the face of the demonic troublemaker Perseus and then cleaved his head from his shoulders with one mighty blow. 

"And Medusa set the mask of Perseus on her shield, as a warning to any of the other sons of the gods of the wages of hubris and disdain for women. Then Medusa took Andromeda to wife, according to the custom they learned from the Amazons, and when the women finally died of a happy old age, Athena set them both among the constellations of the northern skies." 

There was a long silence after Diana finished her tale. Eventually, Steve—quite pink in the face—cleared his throat and said, "Yeah, that… you're sure that story didn't end differently?"

"Not according to my aunt," said Diana firmly. 

As the last rays of the sun disappeared behind the horizon, they came to a village—barely more than a hamlet, not large enough to be mentioned on Steve's map—that huddled along one side of the canal where it met another bridge. A group of skinny children, playing at jumping rope in the street, scattered and vanished indoors when they saw the group approach. Even the little ones were afraid here. 

Sameer went into one of the houses with some coin, and re-emerged a few minutes later with bread and cheese and some brown glass bottles that Charlie greeted with every sign of real glee. 

"Not a lot," Sameer said, dividing the food up and sharing it out, "but they have very little left to be bought, no matter what price I offered."

"It's bloody good beer, though," Charlie said, having already taken a swig from his bottle. "And that makes it as good as a feast."

"No, for that, we need…" Steve rummaged through his bag and produced a rectangular bar of bright paper wrapped around bright metal. Diana soon realised that this, too, was a covering, as Steve peeled away thin golden foil to reveal some kind of brown brick. He snapped the brick into pieces and shared these out, holding the last one out to Diana with a tentative smile on his face. "Peace offering?"

"What is it?" Diana wrinkled her nose. It didn't look very appetising, whatever it was. 

"Chocolate," said Sameer reverently, licking the last traces of his piece from his fingers. 

"The food of the gods," Charlie said. 

"I think I would have heard of it, then," Diana pointed out, but changed her mind as soon as she'd had her first hesitant bite. She felt her eyebrows shoot up. Maybe chocolate was simply another term for ambrosia? "But this is amazing! Does everyone know of this chocolate?"

"A few people," Steve said. 

"It is a _marvel_ ," Diana said. 

"Almost as good as a quick f—" Charlie broke off suddenly, glancing over at Diana. His cheeks reddened. "Forget it, begging your pardon, Miss Diana, no comparison at all to be made."

Sameer and Steve spoke briefly with the village's priest—a thin, balding man whose face was half-hidden behind the long scarf wrapped many times around his neck. What little heat the sun had offered had swiftly vanished once it set, and the man was shivering. He told them that the shelling had been particularly bad to the east of the village, and advised them to cut across the meadows that lay to the north. 

"You'll avoid the worst of it that way, but it would be so much wiser to turn around and go back, my children. God has forsaken that place."

The trouble, of course, Diana thought as they set off again, was that a god had _not_ —that he had chosen to let his shadow lie so heavily across this land and its people. In her mind's eye, she ran through all the forms that Antiope had ever shown her, thinking of how she might best heft her sword against Ares, gold-broker of corpses that he was.

Diana was so lost in her thoughts that she almost missed Sameer trying to coax a story from Steve. 

"A story from each of us," Sameer said as he clambered over the stile that led into the first of the meadows, followed by the rest of them. The ground was waterlogged here, and even Diana found it difficult to walk without making a terrible squelching noise with each step. "That seems fair enough. Come on, Steven, surely you have at least one tale worth the telling?"

"Oh, I don't know," Steve said. "My parents didn't really tell me stories when I was a kid, and I'm from Muncie, Indiana. Not a lot of culture going on in Muncie."

"Well then, I could tell a story _about_ you," Charlie offered. "Remember the time in Brussels when you had to pretend—"

"A story!" Steve blurted out. "I can do a story. This is, uh, this is a tale that my father told me that happened when he was a kid, not long after he and his family moved to the States. They lived near, uh, near a prison and one day there was a prison break. One of the convicts who got out was a pretty famous thief, a real hardened character. He headed for the coast, which wasn't so far away I guess, and he stole a rich man's yacht to make his getaway. Just as he was preparing to set sail, though, he heard these screams. It was a girl and her mother. They'd been out swimming and I guess the tide was too strong for them and they were drowning. Now the convict could have ignored them and sailed on—he knew the cops were hot on his trail and he hadn't a second to waste—and let them die—"

"That would be infamy indeed!" Diana exclaimed, shocked. 

"—but something stopped him. He wasn't a good guy, exactly, but he couldn't just let them drown. So he dived in and rescued them both, and a bunch of people who were watching from the shore see all this happen and they declare him a hero. Only because they saw him jump from this yacht, right, they all think that he's rich, so—"

"This," Sameer interrupted flatly, "is the plot of a Charlie Chaplin film."

"What? No!" Steve said. 

Diana was learning to tell what Steve looked like when he lied—his eyes widened just a fraction more than was normal for him. 

"It is!"

"Is not!"

"So you will say 'oh, Sameer, it is just a _coincidence_ that the very next thing that happens is the mother extends a grateful invitation to the convict to attend a high society party, and—'"

Sameer and Steve's bickering, punctuated by Charlie's occasional short, sharp bursts of laughter, was the anthem for the rest of their journey: across the meadows and along a rutted laneway and through a stand of trees to where the Chief Napi's small campfire glowed a welcome. There the men drank, and ate, and haggled over who got the dryer patch of ground to sleep on. 

Dinner was… well, it was something, served in tin cans that had been heated over the fire. The food was grey, and dripped off the end of her spoon, and Diana couldn't imagine the trickster Goha willingly stealing sacks full of it. 

Steve, sitting next to her, leaned in and said in a low voice, "Helps if you hold your nose with one hand and eat with the other."

Diana wasn't convinced. "How can a people who invented ice cream and chocolate also make something like this?" She prodded at the grey food with the tip of her spoon. It bubbled. 

"I think that comes under the heading of what scholars call 'the human condition.'" 

Diana wrinkled her nose. "What does that mean?"

Steve shrugged. "Hell if I know. I didn't make it through my first semester of college." 

"You speak a lot of nonsense, Steve Trevor," Diana told him, giving the can of food up for a loss and setting it at her feet. "Sometimes I think you even do it on purpose."

"Fifty-fifty," Steve said. He glanced over at her, a half-smile curving his lips. Diana found that she liked what the firelight did to the blue of his eyes. "Tell you what. When this is all over, I'll let you in on the real story of what happened to me at the Indiana State Fair back in '98. It involved a whole lot of nonsense, but it was all in a good cause, I promise."

"With breakfast," Diana said, "and one of your papers."

"Over breakfast and one of my papers," Steve agreed. 

"But with no grey food."

"Deal," Steve said, and clasped her hand in a brief gesture of promise before he stood to help Napi collect more firewood. 

When the others eventually fell asleep, Diana and Napi stayed up to keep watch. Diana didn't know if she'd ever felt so tired, or so little like sleeping. It was the first moment of quiet she'd had all day. The distant artillery had fallen silent; there were no tales being told, no rumble of cart wheels on rutted roads or echoes of long-ago wailing bagpipes or the mechanical rhythms of a ship's engine. On the far side of the stand of trees, Diana could see a stretch of countryside that looked deceptively peaceful: meadowlands that shone in the moonlight. A little huddle of horses moved slowly across the field together, cropping the grass with single-minded focus. No need for them to shriek in fear, or to wear gas masks. What a world Ares had made. 

Diana let out a long, slow breath that trembled on the edge of being a sob. 

Napi's gaze was focused on the little kettle that he filled with water and set to boil over the fire. "If you want, _nisĭs'sa_ , there are some other stories I could tell you you might want to hear."

"I would like that," Diana said, because there were stories for a journey, and tales that would be told after the battle was won—and stories for times like this, for meetings, and waiting, and preparing to face a new day.

**Author's Note:**

> Goha is one of the most popular trickster characters in Arabic folklore, and is sometimes claimed to be based on the medieval Sufi mystic Nasreddin Hodja. Charlie's tale is a mix of a real story told about a place called Mackinnon's Cave on the Isle of Mull with folklore about the Wild Hunt. Diana's story is, of course, a remixing of the myths about Medusa, Perseus, and Andromeda. And Sameer was right—Steve was stealing from the plot of Charlie Chaplin's _The Adventurer_ (1917). The title is a modernised quotation from the prologue to _The Canterbury Tales_.


End file.
